Poems by Paula Cisewski
American Tangle #1
—After Allison Ruby’s Entanglements exhibit
Waiting for the bank’s drive-thru teller
to greet me from a screen I realized
I hadn’t brought my cell along on errands
a little jolt of what if something happens
followed by a minor chord of disgust
something we don’t yet
understand entangles us an obstacle
to our collective to our convening
artificial mycelium cell tower fairy rings
everywhere unlike in a forest a living being
feeds the roots of trees even as it feeds on them
sounds okay from here above ground dare I say
rootless often distracted by my lack of
a pocket device with which I would at best
be doing what devising tonight’s
distraction or asking an app to direct
my lost internal sense of some people
with theirs write whole manifestos on the light rail
and does it matter I don’t know exactly where I am
when I text loved ones from my device rather than
bother them by leaving my voice on their
device is such a tidy word devised
with an intent also difficult
to keep pushing out of my mind
that metal for mine was mined by slaves
it’s so disappointing when things are
right there in the language and I live
oblivious like recently I had to visit
a museum to learn the ground bones
of buffalo strengthened colonists’
bone china cups and saucers at high tea
I have come to find working within
a net of multiple errors is an anxious
passion never not some obstacle
to repair recombine revision or
just while distracted to drop
and shatter the screen of again damn it
device vines down from Old French
devis and before that from Vulgar Latin
divisare in both cases meaning
“division or to divide” my device
performed more slowly than yours
so goodbye I guess forever becomes
a true story to share with strangers
American Tangle #4
—for Camille Gage’s Extinct Species Series, and for Camille
If you plucked a bright
———-body out of the night
—————————–sky
to give it a good scrubbing,
———-if you forgot and soaked
—————————–The North Star
until its fingers pruned: that’s Asteroxylon Mackiei.
Sweet extinct being: we didn’t know you
———-were gone because we didn’t know
—————————–you were here. ———-Our not knowing:
a gold record buried in storage, the magic
———-hour missed. ———-Yes, the bots know
—————————–more music than we’ve forgotten,
but they don’t know the quirk and jolt
———-between lyrics and breakfast, between
—————————–composing odes to elegies and elegies
to elegies and then a fleck of dust gets
———-under the microscope and woops! Hello
—————————–new universe. We didn’t know
what was gone because we didn’t want to love even
———-one single cell more that we’d lose forever
—————————–whether that’s how
forever works or not. So much to love is gone, and so
———-much to love is here, pants ripped back-flipping
—————————–through the run-on sentence of living
and the wind knocked out of us all.——How
———-to concede yet another extinct thing? Honestly,
—————————–I’m friends with too many
dead people on Facebook as is.
———-If our work is to feed the vine
—————————–that connects this life to the sky,
let’s take turns being the xylem
———-then the phloem. Let’s get lost
—————————–in the extant forest of trees
we can’t name:———that tall one,
———-that prickly one, that bent and drooping one
—————————–Rapunzeling its way out of nothing.
Asteroxylon Mackiei: a masterful painting of a photo
———-of a fossil trapped in chert. That’s
—————————–as close to bringing back the dead as
we can get, she says. ——-Then a flash
———-mob of released spores crashes
—————————–the understory.
Paula Cisewski is a poet, artist, educator, writer, editor, and curator. Her hybrid book, Ceremonies for No Repair, is newly released from Beauty School Editions, LLC, and her poetry collection, The Becoming Game, is forthcoming from Hanging Loose Press in spring of 2025. She is also the author of Quitter (Diode Editions Book Prize winner), The Threatened Everything, Ghost Fargo (Nightboat Poetry Prize winner, selected by Franz Wright), Upon Arrival, and several chapbooks.
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